Deepen Your Festival Experience with a Post-festival retreat
Aug 14, 2024
Before the International Summer Festival, Kadampa Centers are organizing activities to accumulate much merit and to allow Kadam Dharma to flourish in the heart. Here are the events arranged by the Los Angeles, Phoenix and Hong Kong Centers.
During the Spring Festival many folks from KMC LA made a special connection with an unchangeable and ever-reliable friend, a real protector, Dorje Shugden.
To deepen this connection, and to destroy any obstacles to our Dharma practice and to the flourishing of the blessed and holy teachings of Je Tsongkhapa in our heart and our world, the idea appeared to engage in a seven day Melodious Drum puja. The idea was also inspired by our success last year when we engaged in forty days of Wishfulfilling Jewel tsog pujas.
For an entire week, every day, practitioners came in from different areas of the city to engage in this very powerful chanted prayer practice with offerings. Some people even joined online and in this way created very strong causes for their own spiritual progress, for their loved ones, and for the world.
On the last day, more than 25 people joined in. Everyone's heart was filled with powerful blessings!
Our hearts were uplifted by the wonderful participation in the Guru Yoga Mandala Offering retreat at KMC Phoenix.
Guru yoga is a profound and powerful method for receiving the blessings of the Buddhas and accumulating vast merit. Through this practice, as taught by Sakya Pandita, we can achieve in one human life what would otherwise take a thousand aeons following the Sutra path alone.
By understanding the role of imagination, born from karma and intention, we can create the self and world we wish to experience. Engaging in the practice of mandala offerings allows us to transform our minds and experience deep spiritual growth.
Thank you to everyone who joined us and made this retreat a truly inspiring experience. Let's continue to walk the path together with joy and dedication.
A heartfelt thank you to Gen Tonglam for sharing with us Venerable Geshe-la’s supreme instructions on how to meditate correctly, how to find the object of meditation - which is a mind such as a determination or an object such as emptiness - how to mix our mind with the object of meditation, and how to carry the object of meditation into our daily life so that we can practice meditation all the time. We also learned how wisdom encourages us to meditate and thus leads to pure happiness..
Gen Tonglam also encouraged us to improve the quality and experience of our meditation by putting Venerable Geshe-la’s instructions into practice now.
Also thank you to Kadampa Teachers, Kelsang Dachog and Joey Chan, for guiding the meditation on cherishing all living beings based on Venerable Geshe-la’s book, The Mirror of Dharma with Additions.